2 minute read
Why don’t I support third party candidates?
The short answer is because my home state elected a professional wrestler as its governor with little more than one in three Minnesotans voting for him. The long answer is that all throughout American history third parties have served to split the vote and harm the very causes they seek to promote. This happened in 1912 when William Howard Taft lost because Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote and it happened again in 2000 when Al Gore lost because Ralph Nader split the Democratic vote. Remember that George W. Bush only won Florida by 537 votes when 97,488 Floridians voted for the left-wing Green Party candidate. Though an ardent Bush supporter at the time, in retrospect I’ve come to think a Gore presidency would’ve been much better for the country and the world. As I see it, everything from the Iraq War to the Great Recession happened because a third party split the Democratic vote.
What about the argument against the “lesser of two evils”?
Here we’ve come full circle to Jesse Ventura again. When asked in April of this year who he’d vote for in the 2020 presidential election he tweeted, “Let me be clear: I have ZERO confidence in Democrats and Republicans. I refuse to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils’ because in the end, that’s still choosing evil.” At first I find myself drawn to that general sentiment, but that impulse is quickly nullified by what is perhaps my foremost political principle: always second-guess the soundness of your own reasoning when you find your perspective aligning with an third-rate former pro wrestler turned incompetent governor turned cancelled cable TV conspiracy theorist. Don’t get me wrong. I’d be thrilled if we could somehow break the false dichotomy of our two-party political system, but this ideal is seasoned by pragmatism from a knowledge of history. It seems to me third parties in American politics just make things worse.
